We stopped using Slack in favor of Telegram, great user experience and not missing any big feature. I will explain to you why š
I was a huge fan of Slack; it made our live lot easier at Open Classifieds to have real time communication with our remote workers. Easy to use anywhere and full featured.
Why?
We reached the 10.000 limit of stored messages, so when you make a search it’s limited to that amount of messages and you can not see any history back. At first this was not a blocking issue but soon we realised that we have replaced email with slack and we needed some info we shared. 10K may seem a lot but if you have some bots integrations as we have with github and different groups you will reach it quite fast.
So first thought was, ok let’s pay to Slack, works great and we are happy with it. No problem to pay for a good product that you use daily. Issue comes on the pricing. We collaborate with a great amount of people that not all of them are employees and we gave them access to slack…. At slack the first pricing tier starts from $8 per user month… for a small startup like us with so many collaborators will be like shooting to your own feat.
Common features
- Real time chat obviously
- Offline messages
- Groups/Channels
- Bots (integrate github and not much more)
- Share files / images
- Search messages
- API
- Mention users
- Use it anywhere, mobile, web, desktop natives apps
Telegram betterĀ than Slack
- Free, no matter amount of chats, images etc.
- Unlimited, search history
- Secret chats, awesome to share 1 time passwords screenshots or nudes xD
- Open Source with great community
- Privacy seems a really serious stuff on telegram and they endorse it
- Audio notes!
SlackĀ betterĀ thanĀ Telegram
- You need to have a mobile phone to use telegram, for digital nomads can be an issue
- Search engine with tags lot better
- Integrations, Slack has a huge amount of bots and great integrations, I miss some at telegram
- Mark message as favorite, this is really useful.
What needs to improve Telegram
- The native apps for Linux and Web do not let you start Secret chats
- The native apps should be more responsive the sidebar of the users is too big for my taste
- Design could be a bit better but I like it!
- Integrations and bots, I have tried many that do not work
- Mark messages as favorite so you can check later
Other alternatives
I have tried different chat solutions but none was as good as telegram.
- Whatsapp, no desktop app, no offline messages, no usernames (without num), no secret chats, files, bots, apis…
- Hipchat, ugly linux implementation, bad UI
- rocket.chat was my favorite option and we were really close to use it, but you need to host it yourself and maintain it of course, great job they did here.